Why does it takes hours or even days to remove a project in JIRA?

[William Ing]

Atlassian recommends to perform slow operations during off-peak hours but it seems that they are slow even if these instances are not used at all. 

Removing a project with 13.000 issues from an instance with 400.000 issues seems to take more than an hour, even if is running on a machine with 256GB RAM and SSDs. The speed seems to be somewhere around 10-50 issues/second.

Do you know a way to improve performance of project removal in JIRA?

This is a real when you have to split JIRA instances because the XML export/restore is useless because there are no computers that can load this kind of XML into memory.

[William Ing]

When you have to remove a single project with 180.000 issues inside, the bulk change is clearly not an option. Also it seems that on some projects removal even fails with a NullPointer error, just raise a new bug https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-59675

[Vasiliy Zverev]

Just for experiment could you select issues to delete via JQL and try to delete it from issue navigator. As I know 1000 issues could be selected for bulk operation.

[William Ing]

Excuse me for not specifying that the JVM is configured to use 30GB or RAM, and this instance was used exclusively by one user, just to remove about 100 projects, one by one (scripted, obviously). 

The average removal speed was estimated to be 10-20 issues/second. The 32 cores on the machines were clearly not used, as the removal tasks seems to work on a single thread.

[Vasiliy Zverev]

NO matter how many RAM do you have on your mashine. JIRA uses its own virtual mashine. try to increse memery used by JIRA: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/increasing-jira-memory-5896.html